I *really* hope this isn't a hoax. Not knowing anything about the camera, my only concern is that a typical digital camera wouldn't normally have the processing power or memory to run this.
BTW, I can't download zip files through our firewall, so I haven't been able to check any of the downloadable stuff on the site.
We're talking about a PIII Xeon here, Bruce, not a regular PIII. With the Xeon, you're paying extra for two things:
Large amounts of on-chip cache
Intel's extra profit margin. Since the competitors (UltraSPARC, MIPS, high-end Alpha) all have 4-figure price tags, Intel does the same too, to give themselves a large profit margin.
Who is willing to go back and rewrite all this code to be 64 bit happy?
A couple of points:
If the code is well written, porting to 64-bits is simply a matter of recompiling. Sure, much code around today isn't well written, but the changes needed aren't usually that great.
64-bit OSes almost invariably allow 32-bit apps to run unmodified anyway, so you can carry on using your old apps. There will be certain classes of application (e.g., large databases, scientific number crunching, rendering etc.) that will be better off as native 64-bit apps, and those will have to be made 64-bit friendly to make best use of the hardware, but most programs will not benefit significantly.
Given that most cryptographic algorithms are well known and understood worldwide, can governments control their use effectively by legal means? Do you think legal restrictions on cryptography are likely to become more or less strict over the coming years?
That being said, if I remember right, Compaq did the initial reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS. If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have PC clones.
Actually, it was Phoenix that reverse engineered the BIOS. I think Compaq were the first to build and sell a system around the Phoenix BIOS, though, and they were certainly the first to make a 386 based machine (ahead of IBM, even -- quite impressive at the time).
It's a serious question. Why should I use Photogenics? What does it have over the competition? Photoshop not being on Linux is a *huge* lose for me. As such, I currently use Gimp for most of what I do. It's not perfect, particularly for CMYK work, but most of what I do is web graphics, and for that it's good enough. It could do with being able to modify a layer with a mask without having to first apply the mask, and a few other goodies, but overall it's a very good app.
At $99, I'd certainly consider buying Photogenics if it gave me enough over and above what I've already got. The feature list looks good, but not enough to make me rush out and buy it... or am I missing something?
I sense an abuse in moderation here. And I'm a little ticked that I can't find an easy way to tattle-tale about it to the guys running Slashdot.
Actually, uou can. Just mail Rob with the offending comment ID. Not that I can easily find the comment ID any more. Either way, a URL to the comment should do.
That said, although I'm not happy about it (it lowers my karma:-), it was offtopic. It's interesting to note that the only two posts that were marked offtopic were mine and _Sprocket_'s -- both of us have high enough karma to have a default score of 2 for all our postings. I wonder if it's because our postings at score 2 fell above the moderator's threshold, so were shown in full rather than just as titles? That's why I'm explicitly posting this without the +1 bonus...
I'm sure Zeus does rather well. However, what we have here is further proof that a single component does not a system make. Slashdot is on them - even the power of Zeus can not save them.
Yep, I couldn't agree more. However, the original poster claimed that the server couldn't handle the load. I was merely trying to point out that since they were running Zeus, it was extremely unlikely that the load on the server was the problem.
Stop having good content. Your server can't handle the load!:)
Actually, they're running Zeus, which can handle all the load you want to throw at it (last time I looked, it was far and away the highest performing web server on the planet on any system). There may be other flaws in their system, but unless they're running Zeus on a 486 or something, I'm sure it can handle the load:-)
But the program which actually scared me off due to its allmost unreadeble configuration file has allways been sendmail.
Which configuration file would that be? sendmail.cf? Even Eric Allman (author of sendmail) says he treats sendmail.cf as a binary file. Stick to the M4 files that are used to generate sendmail.cf and you'll be fine. They're certainly readable.
Would someone care to explain how GPAs are calculated for those non-Americans among us? What's a typical/good value? Oh, and the same applies for SATs.
It was in the Inter//face pullout from The Times on Monday. Yes, they're owned by Murdoch, but they have full editorial control (unlike The Sun and News Of The World). Of course, that doesn't make them accurate all the time, but they're mostly not used to push Murdoch's point of view.
Disclaimer: News International, publisher of the papers in question, is my current employer.
I was disappointed by Paxman, though. He has the ability to be much more direct, as witnessed by some of his political interviewing. I felt he didn't really push gates on any of the meaningful issues. I felt Gates did come across as being very much blinded to real world. How can he realistically claim to have never heard a Bill Gates joke? He seems to believe that since MS have a lot of clever people working for them (which they undoubtedly do) that MS are the only people that are capable of doing clever stuff with computers. He repeatedly stressed that MS products are always as good as they can make them (worrying, if true), even to the point of defending Microsoft Bob. And he keeps trying to claim that MS helped create the Internet. Sigh.
Is he evil? No. Is he misguided? Yes, I think so. He can't see past his own technological vision, and doesn't seem to accept that others may want things to work differently. With the amount of power he wields in the industry, that's definitely something to worry about.
Outside of the computer press(this includes computer sections of mainstream press), MS exerts almost zero influence. [...] He feels Murdoch works to pollute and shape the minds of his readers.
On the day Windows 95 was launched, MS payed News International (owned by one Rupert Murdoch, and my current employer) to sponsor The Times, one of the UK's most respected papers, for a day -- basically the paper was free for that one day. Coincidentally, The Times chose to run a hefty pullout section that day about Windows 95, in which it claimed Bill Gates was globally accepted as being the most brilliant programmer of his generation. Still think MS doesn't have influence over the mainstream press? This one incident appalled and disgusted me, but it did make me realise just how much money talks... Oh, and by the way, I won't deny that Murdoch shapes and pollutes the minds of his readers. He blatantly does, but then again, the sort of people that read The Sun don't have much of a mind to start with:-)
And WHY are TV's still hardwired to be PAL _or_ NTSC and not able to deal with both.....
In France, multi-format TVs are pretty common (though not universal). This is probably due the fact that they're stuck with a TV standard (SECAM) that no-one else other than Russia uses. Multi-format TVs let them view TV from other nearby European nations (the UK, Germany, etc.). I know of several people in France that view UK satellite TV using a multi-format TV. I suspect multi-format TVs haven't caught on elsewhere because there's no real demand without which prices aren't driven down. In France, there is a demand, and multi-format TVs are barely more expensive than a regular TV.
Strangely enough, I commented to Xig back in August that them putting down XFree86 in their ads was making them less trustworthy in my opinion, and it made me less inclined to buy their products. Here's their reply:
Actually, the motivation for the direct comparisons to XF86 are simply done to indicate to folks considering using Linux in a corporate desktop environment that there is a commercial alternative to the free graphics sw they get with their favorite Linux distribution. XF86 has achieved its primary objective of delivering a modicum of graphics support for the Linux hacker/enthusiast. The problem is that it isn't good enough to garner corporate blessing on the desktop (we know this first hand). Unfortunately, most recommenders/decision makers in the corporate sector come from the microsoft paradigm - graphics is part of the OS. So, when their Linux desktop locks up, crashes, runs slowly they incorrectly determine that Linux isn't ready for the big leagues yet.
We know this isn't the case. And we're faced with the need to deliver this message in as direct a manner as possible to educate the consumer we're trying to reach (namely a corporate recommender/decision maker). In other words, we're working very hard to help the Linux hacker/enthusiast get Linux into his/her company. We've found this to be the most effective vehicle for capturing mindshare for Linux at the IT manager/executive level.
So there you go. Convinced? No, neither am I. That said, to a certain extent, they're right. Although XFree86 provides far more than a modicum of graphics support, AccelX is faster, and the design of AccelX is much cleaner, with a single X server and loadable drivers. Hopefully XFree86-4.0 should fix this. And like it or not, corporate customers like to give money away in exchange for peace of mind (whether justified or not). They really *do* think that paying Xig for an X server will mean less crashes. In my experience, both AccelX and XFree86 have crashed on me exactly once each, so both are pretty stable. Don't credit corporate types with logical thought processes -- they simply don't have them. If AccelX is a way to please them, then so be it. The advertising still smarts for the rest of us, though.
In my eyes, he's just another greedy "Internet" millionaire making money on other people's work.
As it happens, I don't think there's any of my code in Red Hat. But if there was, I would be happy that Bob Young and the rest of Red Hat became millionaires on the back of it. Unlike many of us, they actually got off their backsides and collected large quantities of the available free software, and put it together into a handy distribution. I guess you probably weren't around in the early days, when we used to have to download, compile and install everything ourselves. Why shouldn't they make money from saving us time and effort by collating stuff onto an easy-to-use CD? If your idea of free software is preventing people from making money from it, then your view is different to mine. Remember: free speech, not free beer.
For a project that's supposed to allow effective communication, they could at least have designed a web site that works well in all browsers. No alt attributes for images... Sigh. Those of us using lynx just have guess, based on the image names:-(
making rpm's more like installshield would be kind of interesting...
This is a horrendous idea. Package distributions, like RPM,.deb, and SysV's packages are far superior to self installing executables like the ones installshield produces. They're easily verifyable with digital signatures, for a start. You can easily list which packages are installed, uninstall or upgrade packages with a single command, none of which are available with the installshield method. The route we should be going down is the one used by the GNOME (and probably KDE) people -- double click on a package in your file manager to bring up a user friendly GUI to install that package.
Aarrrggghhh!!!! No!. Mesa is an implementation of OpenGL (although it's not officially OpenGL compliant). OpenGL is a generic graphics language, which works fine in 2D. It just happens to excel at 3D as well.
Normally if, for example, intelligence was the most preferred trait.. you'd eventually start getting intelligent people. But now that we can control genetics... maybe there will be a glut of football players instead of intelligent people.. bypassing the darwinian method of selection.
Controlling genetics has nothing to do with it. My other half has long argued that intelligence isn't a survival trait. Intelligent people are having less children than stupid people. Is this just an example of Darwinism in action? Is intelligence beneficial for the survival of the human race? Up to a certain point, yes, but you could argue that high intelligence is unnecessary, and in fact undesirable, for the continued existence of the human race. The race will last longer without it, albeit in a slightly more primitive manner. The only point at which this argument breaks down is when space travel becomes necessary for survival. Will the intelligence to do it have been bred out by then? Only time will tell...
I can't remember Quake1 NOT having full movement in any direction.
Imagine your head is in place of the camera in Quake. Now imagine tilting your head to the left, so it's resting on your shoulder. The quake engine doesn't let you do that.
I've got lots of friends who work in the games industry, and they're all in huge development teams (typically 35 or more people) with all the useless (IMHO) management junk hanging on. Do you think id's refusal to go down this route (last I heard, you had 13 employees) has helped in your success? From what I've seen, you've been able to consistently keep quality high and deliver an end product without resorting to having 7 artists, 6 musicians, 3 game concept designers and countless hordes of coders. Basically, do you think staying small has helped ship a decent product in a sensible timeframe?
As long as you're being picky, Wolf3d and Doom weren't 3D:) But Quake 1 was.
Well, if you're going to be that picky, then Quake 1 wasn't 3D, but Descent was. As far as I'm concered, Wolf3D, Doom, Quake and Descent are *all* 3D, just different sorts. Wolfenstein was a 3D game with 2D levels. Doom added the ability to go up and down, but not to look up and down. Quake (and indeed, Heretic before it) added that, but Descent was the first mainstream game to have 6DOF (i.e., full 3D movement).
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, I can't download zip files through our firewall, so I haven't been able to check any of the downloadable stuff on the site.
A couple of points:
Given that most cryptographic algorithms are well known and understood worldwide, can governments control their use effectively by legal means? Do you think legal restrictions on cryptography are likely to become more or less strict over the coming years?
Scott McNealy claims we've already fought and lost the war for personal privacy. Do you agree with him or not, and why?
Actually, it was Phoenix that reverse engineered the BIOS. I think Compaq were the first to build and sell a system around the Phoenix BIOS, though, and they were certainly the first to make a 386 based machine (ahead of IBM, even -- quite impressive at the time).
At $99, I'd certainly consider buying Photogenics if it gave me enough over and above what I've already got. The feature list looks good, but not enough to make me rush out and buy it... or am I missing something?
Actually, uou can. Just mail Rob with the offending comment ID. Not that I can easily find the comment ID any more. Either way, a URL to the comment should do.
That said, although I'm not happy about it (it lowers my karma :-), it was offtopic. It's interesting to note that the only two posts that were marked offtopic were mine and _Sprocket_'s -- both of us have high enough karma to have a default score of 2 for all our postings. I wonder if it's because our postings at score 2 fell above the moderator's threshold, so were shown in full rather than just as titles? That's why I'm explicitly posting this without the +1 bonus...
Yep, I couldn't agree more. However, the original poster claimed that the server couldn't handle the load. I was merely trying to point out that since they were running Zeus, it was extremely unlikely that the load on the server was the problem.
Actually, they're running Zeus, which can handle all the load you want to throw at it (last time I looked, it was far and away the highest performing web server on the planet on any system). There may be other flaws in their system, but unless they're running Zeus on a 486 or something, I'm sure it can handle the load :-)
Which configuration file would that be? sendmail.cf? Even Eric Allman (author of sendmail) says he treats sendmail.cf as a binary file. Stick to the M4 files that are used to generate sendmail.cf and you'll be fine. They're certainly readable.
Would someone care to explain how GPAs are calculated for those non-Americans among us? What's a typical/good value? Oh, and the same applies for SATs.
Disclaimer: News International, publisher of the papers in question, is my current employer.
Is he evil? No. Is he misguided? Yes, I think so. He can't see past his own technological vision, and doesn't seem to accept that others may want things to work differently. With the amount of power he wields in the industry, that's definitely something to worry about.
On the day Windows 95 was launched, MS payed News International (owned by one Rupert Murdoch, and my current employer) to sponsor The Times, one of the UK's most respected papers, for a day -- basically the paper was free for that one day. Coincidentally, The Times chose to run a hefty pullout section that day about Windows 95, in which it claimed Bill Gates was globally accepted as being the most brilliant programmer of his generation. Still think MS doesn't have influence over the mainstream press? This one incident appalled and disgusted me, but it did make me realise just how much money talks... Oh, and by the way, I won't deny that Murdoch shapes and pollutes the minds of his readers. He blatantly does, but then again, the sort of people that read The Sun don't have much of a mind to start with :-)
In France, multi-format TVs are pretty common (though not universal). This is probably due the fact that they're stuck with a TV standard (SECAM) that no-one else other than Russia uses. Multi-format TVs let them view TV from other nearby European nations (the UK, Germany, etc.). I know of several people in France that view UK satellite TV using a multi-format TV. I suspect multi-format TVs haven't caught on elsewhere because there's no real demand without which prices aren't driven down. In France, there is a demand, and multi-format TVs are barely more expensive than a regular TV.
So there you go. Convinced? No, neither am I. That said, to a certain extent, they're right. Although XFree86 provides far more than a modicum of graphics support, AccelX is faster, and the design of AccelX is much cleaner, with a single X server and loadable drivers. Hopefully XFree86-4.0 should fix this. And like it or not, corporate customers like to give money away in exchange for peace of mind (whether justified or not). They really *do* think that paying Xig for an X server will mean less crashes. In my experience, both AccelX and XFree86 have crashed on me exactly once each, so both are pretty stable. Don't credit corporate types with logical thought processes -- they simply don't have them. If AccelX is a way to please them, then so be it. The advertising still smarts for the rest of us, though.
As it happens, I don't think there's any of my code in Red Hat. But if there was, I would be happy that Bob Young and the rest of Red Hat became millionaires on the back of it. Unlike many of us, they actually got off their backsides and collected large quantities of the available free software, and put it together into a handy distribution. I guess you probably weren't around in the early days, when we used to have to download, compile and install everything ourselves. Why shouldn't they make money from saving us time and effort by collating stuff onto an easy-to-use CD? If your idea of free software is preventing people from making money from it, then your view is different to mine. Remember: free speech, not free beer.
For a project that's supposed to allow effective communication, they could at least have designed a web site that works well in all browsers. No alt attributes for images... Sigh. Those of us using lynx just have guess, based on the image names :-(
This is a horrendous idea. Package distributions, like RPM, .deb, and SysV's packages are far superior to self installing executables like the ones installshield produces. They're easily verifyable with digital signatures, for a start. You can easily list which packages are installed, uninstall or upgrade packages with a single command, none of which are available with the installshield method. The route we should be going down is the one used by the GNOME (and probably KDE) people -- double click on a package in your file manager to bring up a user friendly GUI to install that package.
Aarrrggghhh!!!! No!. Mesa is an implementation of OpenGL (although it's not officially OpenGL compliant). OpenGL is a generic graphics language, which works fine in 2D. It just happens to excel at 3D as well.
Controlling genetics has nothing to do with it. My other half has long argued that intelligence isn't a survival trait. Intelligent people are having less children than stupid people. Is this just an example of Darwinism in action? Is intelligence beneficial for the survival of the human race? Up to a certain point, yes, but you could argue that high intelligence is unnecessary, and in fact undesirable, for the continued existence of the human race. The race will last longer without it, albeit in a slightly more primitive manner. The only point at which this argument breaks down is when space travel becomes necessary for survival. Will the intelligence to do it have been bred out by then? Only time will tell...
Imagine your head is in place of the camera in Quake. Now imagine tilting your head to the left, so it's resting on your shoulder. The quake engine doesn't let you do that.
I've got lots of friends who work in the games industry, and they're all in huge development teams (typically 35 or more people) with all the useless (IMHO) management junk hanging on. Do you think id's refusal to go down this route (last I heard, you had 13 employees) has helped in your success? From what I've seen, you've been able to consistently keep quality high and deliver an end product without resorting to having 7 artists, 6 musicians, 3 game concept designers and countless hordes of coders. Basically, do you think staying small has helped ship a decent product in a sensible timeframe?
Well, if you're going to be that picky, then Quake 1 wasn't 3D, but Descent was. As far as I'm concered, Wolf3D, Doom, Quake and Descent are *all* 3D, just different sorts. Wolfenstein was a 3D game with 2D levels. Doom added the ability to go up and down, but not to look up and down. Quake (and indeed, Heretic before it) added that, but Descent was the first mainstream game to have 6DOF (i.e., full 3D movement).